You are sitting at your computer, cursor blinking on your calendar app, eyes shifting back and forth from your written plan to your calendar:

Blog post last week… missed

Sales page… partially finished

Emails to promotional partners… unsent

You rub the bridge of your nose as you glance at the clearly written plan sitting on your desk. Daily tasks, weekly projects, monthly and quarterly objectives: each and every step set out and ready to act on.

All you had to do was follow each step, one after the other.

But it didn’t happen. Day in and day out, you dodged tasks and missed important milestones. Now with just days until everything is supposed to go live, you are behind on your plan.

Oh, and what’s that sound getting louder? Has somebody invited the entrepreneur’s best friends over? Have doubt, inadequacy, and maybe even shame come to visit you and your failed plans?

What happened?

What happened is that productivity systems — whether you use a book, paper, or an app — are missing an important factor, and that omission is leading to your sabotaging your own best-laid plans. Productivity systems forget to take the COST OF THE PLANS into account.[Read more…]

An organized, and intentional gratitude practice can make a huge difference in your daily energy, attitude, and motivation. If a gratitude practice can have such a positive impact on your daily experience, why not apply the same concept when thinking about your money?

Watch this video, then complete the suggested exercise and start a gratitude practice specifically focused on your money.[Read more…]

How many different ideas do you have filling up space in your brain, notebooks, word documents, and random scraps of paper?

If you are similar to me (and most entrepreneurs, freelancers, and business owners) you have more on the go than you can possibly contain in your brain.

I am pretty sure that I forget more ideas, or lose them in notebooks and scraps of paper, than I actually bring to life in my business. Which makes me sad.

I currently use Charlie Gilkey’s Free Weekly Project Planners to organize my days and weeks but I have never found a system that works to capture ideas and projects. Nothing has worked. I forget about things I jot down in notebooks. I accidentally erase whiteboards to capture some new idea. Lists of ideas and longer term plans end up in a pile of papers, discovered long after they could have been useful.

Linking ideas and money

So, today I decided to start testing a new approach by organizing my ideas based on what value in dollars they can bring my business, and how quickly they could generate this value.

Now, I am not saying that money should be the only determining factor in what ideas you work on. But, if you first reduce your list of ideas so that only the ideas that provide value to your community are left, then organizing them on how they will benefit your business strikes me as a solid idea.

My Idea Problem

Ideas in need of organizing

This is my current idea and future project planning system. Within this pile of sketch books, notebooks, scraps of paper, and duotangs (I think that one is a Canadian word, they are like soft covered binders) reside all of the ideas and future projects that land inside my brain throughout the workday, weekend, and in the middle of the night.

The problem is, each of these idea receptacles then gets moved somewhere and all of the ideas becpme “out of sight, out of mind” and forgotten.

At some later date I will gather all of the different bits and pieces (as I have for this picture) and attempt to organize them into some sort of functional system.